


The Quivering Pens

by Otherwise_Uncolonized



Category: Frozen (2013), Rise of the Guardians (2012), Tangled (2010)
Genre: Accidental Bonding, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Arendelle, Attraction, Captivity, Child Abandonment, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Childhood, Childhood Friends, Childhood Sweethearts, Childhood Trauma, Crossover, Dark, Discrimination, Disney Movies, Drama, Elsa (Frozen) & Jack Frost (Rise of the Guardians) Friendship, Elsa Has Issues, Escape, Ethnocentrism, F/M, Family Drama, Family Issues, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Germany, Hate Crimes, Historical References, Humor, Loss of Powers, Male-Female Friendship, Minor Elsa, Morbid, Multi, No Elsa (Frozen)/Jack Frost (Rise of the Guardians), Norway (Country), Nuns, On Hiatus, Orphanage, Orphans, Political Alliances, Politics, Post-Death in the Family, Princes & Princesses, Queen Elsa, Racism, Royalty, Running Away, Supernatural Illnesses, The Southern Isles, Theft, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-03-18 19:27:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3581169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Otherwise_Uncolonized/pseuds/Otherwise_Uncolonized
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><span class="u">@()xxx[{:::":::":::":::":::":::":::></span>

</p><p>It is easier to overwrite yourself than it is to take authorship of the life you leave behind. An orphan wants to be more than his dirty hands; a princess wants to be more than her shaking fingers. One learns to survive through imitating a storybook swashbuckler; the other must imitate the crowned king in her picture frame. 

</p><p>After living under one expression practiced since childhood, how many bones does it take to break character?

</p><p>Between borrowed storybooks, stolen crowns, burning orphanages, corrupted politicians, evil trolls, and executional nooses, a silver-lining is found inside the cracks of their masks: "Life isn't a storybook, and gloves don't hide the shaking, but I can still write my own beginning and call it mine."

</p><p>
  <b>(Frozen | Tangled | Rise of the Guardians AU)</b>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Broken Wishbones ✞

                                                                                          ****

* * *

Sometimes a boy must die a thousand nights before he can grow tall enough to see the sunrise.

"Cry. Please cry, Eugene. She will stop beating you when you  _cry_."

There were two cries heard then: the cry of a whipped child, which shook walls, and the cry of an angry nun, which shook devils.

"You wretched boy! You _wretched_ , despicable  _ingrate_!"

Rats scattered as a lantern was thrown down and shattered.

"You've no  _head_  upon your shoulders, do you? Wetting the bed at all hours of the night and carrying on as you do! My bones are weak ― my hands are  _wrinkled!_  How much more must you  _wring_  out of me before I am in the grave? I don't have the young skin that you so merrily skip around in!"

Tears hit his toes, making the floor wet.

"Pull up your britches! I've finished with you, haven't I?!"

Shaking, the boy pulled them up. Every bone and muscle in his body felt like a broken tooth with bleeding gums.

"Hurry yourself! By the time you're through, the crayfish will be singing in the mountains!"

His trembling knees wouldn't unbend and his back wouldn't straighten. The burns were too hot, the flesh too raw, and when he reached around to touch the whip's singes, he felt where it had branded the meat of his skin. He tried to cry out, but the nun held him down by the neck and bore his back to her audience.

"Take a long look at this canvas," she advised. "These are the consequences of your noble peer's actions, so let this be a  _lesson_  to you  _all_."

The children on the stairwell were speechless with horror. " _I don't want a lashing!"_  and " _I want Papa!"_  slobbered from trembling mouths as voices and pleas sank together, but one much smaller than the rest rose above them all:

" _Mother_ , why is this done to us?"

The nun's mouth was shut into silence. She squinted at every dark head in the group, snarling, "Stop  _hiding_  her and  _show her_  to me."

Children cleared for her one by one, revealing the tiny child who stood in the heart of them like a  _Messiah_  before parting seas. Her goldilocks hung from her scalp in mats, the grey nightgown stained with pudding, and her eyes looked as new and young as a baby bird's.

"Do...you not like us...? Is it because Papas were mud-skinned savages and Mamas were pale-faced fish-eaters?" She said the pejorative terms with innocence, having only been educated by the ignorance around her.

The dragoness in cloak and veil answered with nightmarish propaganda, "It is neither my nor your fault that you are all  _othered_  by Arendelle like unwanted stepchildren. It is explicitly the fault of your sinning parents, and by no one's doing but their own, your very bodies have been born for whips and chains."

"Mother Superior!"

Her tyranny stopped at the cry of the little nun who'd told the beaten boy to cry. The girl's eyes were bright with fright and fight, but when the old face came forward and loomed over her candle, the bravery fell apart, and she tripped back on her fear. " _Mother..._ " she bowed from the waist, voice smaller than a flea's. "Forgive me, but I...I heard the older orphans waking in their rooms―"

 _"Sister_  Jensen..." The senior's face looked like a chimera's in the candlelight. "You are new; until I ask for your assistance, you will hold no further opinion under my authority. Have I made myself quite clear?"

The young girl shook, with a quiet nod, in the sweat of her own inferiority, and submitted herself as the lesser woman. "Forgive me,  _Mother_...I didn't mean―"

 _"_ Good _._ " The senior's leather whip was rolled up and dropped into the junior's hand. "Now  _you_  will take this and do in the next orphan while I escort this  _Kraut_  to his dorm. Is that...quite  _reasonable_  to  _you_?"

"Yes, Mother." The young nun dabbed her forehead with her handkerchief, quivering like a leaf. "However, I...initially thought to fetch new bed sheets for the boy?"

"New bed sheets?"

"Why, y― _yes_ , Mother. Since his bed sheets still have urine on them, I assumed―"

"You assumed nonsense. This  _Kraut_  will be sleeping in them as they are."

"P―...Pardon?"

"Sister Jensen, war children do not learn without rigid  _discipline_. The dirty blood  _sewered_  into them by foreigners and traitors gives them a mental retardation for which there is no rearing, and you are naive to think otherwise."

Tendrils of mucus dripped from Eugene's nostrils as he shook from where he stood. The children beside him held the scared eyes of birds and rabbits caged in a slaughterhouse, but not a single one spoke, not even the little  _Messiah._

Looking all around the faces in the hall, the senior seemed to blink a wetness― _a humanness_ ―out of her eyes before facing the boy. "Come, child. You are to be returned to your room."

The orphan scrubbed the mucus off his nose with the heel of his palm and slipped back into his clothes one wince at a time. When impatience imbued her with anger, the nun grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and shoved him towards the hallway. Children hid behind their neighbors as the nun's shadow darkened their faces before walking past them. Eugene glanced at the junior nun with watering eyes, and she watched him with caged tears in her own. After his face disappeared behind the corner, her eyes slipped into a hard shut.

"You will sleep in your sheets for a week," Mother Superior instructed. "If we catch you cleaning them, you will be whipped every night for a week more."

He was too tired to care. To hurt. To think. He hobbled beside her with his hand following the wall _._

"You will be bathroom monitored by Gottmar. Quality time should warm you two up to each other." Cold fingers landed on his shoulder and gripped. "So have you learned your lesson?"

The closer they got to the room, the closer he felt to a final moment in his life, but they were no memories worth remembering to look back on.

" _Have_  you  _learned_  your  _lesson_ , Eugene?" The hand on his shoulder began to squeeze it.

Her voice became something of a fist around his throat, so he whispered, "Yes," with eyes full of nothing. When they reached the dorm, the door was wide open and waiting for him like hell's gates.

The senior nun stopped him at the foot of it. "Remember,  _Fitzherbert_ , you were put here because you were bad and your mother did not want you."

He blinked back tears and fog as his mind worked to process the information that was being pipelined to his brain.

"You were bad because your  _father_  was bad, and he wanted neither  _you_  nor  _her_."

He barred the tears as best he could; swallowed the salt, the breaking, the agony, but there was no getting away from what his ears could not unhear. Her words had left deeper burns than the whip, shrinking him into the tiny nothing he was told to know of himself

"Now go to bed."

...And then he walked into the room of sleeping boys, crawled into his bed, yanked the covers over himself, and sobbed until his diaphragm collapsed on his stomach.

Mother Superior watched him end from the doorway. With satisfaction, she closed the door on his shuddering silhouette, and Eugene was left in the darkness with the sick  _-crack-_  of his ribs echoing in the chamber of his skeleton.

"Eugene?" A voice piped in the dark. " _Eugene_!"

Eugene's shoulders shook as he wept and wailed―

" _Eugenius_!" The boy calling him picked off a piece of bread that had been hiding under his blanket. "Pssst!  _Eugene_! I stole some bread from ol' turkey-necked Mother  _Stu'perior_! Been saving it since Tuesday, I have! You want some?"

Eugene's eyelashes were so sticky that he couldn't peel them apart to look at the boy. He could only see the beginnings of toenails and dirty feet hanging off the mattress. "I 'on't want  _nuttin'_..." he sniffled and hiccuped, dragging his sleeve under his nose.

"...I'm offerin' because I heard you  _scream_ , Eugene...and you ain't  _never_  let y'self scream all the time you been here..."

The crying boy's lips were pasty with saliva as he tried to part them to gurgle out, "Go to  _sleep_ , Stig. M'back  _h-hurts_..."

The younger orphan made a face. Keeping his next thoughts to himself, he turned on his side and shimmied down into his sheets, giving the boy one last glance before facing the other way. "...'Night, 'gene. I'ma give you tha' bread in the mornin'..."

The older orphan sighed and rolled over to face the window. The moon's face was full and smiling; perhaps the only thing that did every night. "...Star- _light_ , star- _bright_ ," he muffled, thumb under his teeth, pillow squeezed to his face as tears made tracks down his cheeks. "I wish I may, I wish I  _might_...h―have the wish I wish tonight..." He closed his eyes, placed his fingers on the lids, and forced his aching bones to dream: ' _Please make me wings...'_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1) Kraut: a derogatory term for a German person; often used for war children.
> 
> (2) Norsk: a Norwegian person. 
> 
> AUTHOR NOTE: 
> 
> This story has a loose theme about people creating "characters within themselves" to emotionally survive life as they have it, even at the risk of avoiding their own reflections: I.E. Eugene's "Flynn Rider" and Elsa's "Queenly Mask."
> 
> ❈ The facade that is "Flynn Rider" is an imitation of a storybook swashbuckler to hide the character flaws, childhood agonies, and insecurities insid Eugene.
> 
> ❈ The facade that is "Queen Elsa" is an imitation of her father's expectations to hide the character flaws, childhood anxieties, and insecurities inside Elsa.
> 
> Zachary Levi: "There are many messages to take from the film. Flynn's kind of journey of kind of being true to himself, and knowing that you don't need to create this facade; that it's okay to be you and own who you are and love who you are. And at the end of the day - at the end of the film - you get this incredible message of self-sacrifice and love, and that's huge; (...) to offer that to someone else."
> 
> Idina Menzel: "She compromises herself for a very long time, until (...) she at least finally becomes her truest self and owns who she is."
> 
> Interviewer: "What would you say you're most scared of in life?"
> 
> "I guess in relation to Elsa, it's the idea of really letting go and showing all of who I am to the world - and I think especially women - you know, when we're powerful and strong women - we wrestle with the fact of letting that be and still being loved."
> 
> ^ So after reading that, it seemed worth crossing over, and this is a rare one, so exotic breeds always entice me. 
> 
> However, the story's inspiration came from the history between Norway and Germany with war children in orphanages. Tangled ("Germany") and Frozen ("Norway") are crossed over for an un-canon cameo in the Frozen film; Eugene's orphanage experience was a "downer sob story," so it's like gravy on mashed potatoes.
> 
> As a rule, my depiction of war children is only inspired by the former information. Since Tangled is "not really" Germany and Frozen is "not really" Norway, Arendelle and Corona are their own fictional locations with fabricated regimes, but certain aspects of their cultures are Norwegian and German in this draft, while the kingdoms themselves have their own fictional systems. You will also see many AU liberties taken with Elsa's "Frozen" arc and etc.


	2. ♔ Torn Livers

 ❍༻༺♕༻༺❍

_~Gentlemen of the Privy Council,_

_Tonight will mark the 6th anniversary of Arendelle's liberation from enemy occupation. Lanterns will be raised to guide our country's lost children home and veterans will be reminded of their freedom. Alas, such a tradition has done a little ways more to remind me of the liberty denied from my own blood, and the shackles I have worn on my conscience ever since. The voice of virtue, my duty as a brother, and my desire to have your help, have led me to address you all together. I rely on your affection for me, as both your King and your Gabrielle, to grant me this closure._

_I take up my pen in the hour of emancipation, and ask you now to recall the year my sister replaced her tiara with a saint's veil. She was groomed for marriage since her delivery, preened to be sold like fabric to Corona's king. My father, King Olaf II, whom I loved dearly, taught her that a mouth closed in silence was a pretty one; as a result, she concealed her truths by placing her tears in her napkins and folding them under the table whenever the nobles were seated, hiding her true face from myself and our father. I can not bookmark the prologue to her detachment, but it is clear that, during those evenings, she was not honest with either of us._ _We would only come to find out much later that her heart of hearts had been betrothed to a love our parents did not arrange for her: Our Savior, the Immortal Groom._

_On the day of her marriage, she fled the castle and hid in a convent, begging the abbess to tonsure her; I am certain that it was not an easy persuasion, but one's love for Our Father has never been ecshewed. From that day forward, my sister, Princess Estine, was accepted among the abbess ranks with the title of Saint Ethel. Her informal actions were embraced by my mother, shunned by my father, and damned by King Lothair, putting the alliance between Arendelle and Corona under fire. I, in particular, felt abandoned by my last living sibling; while time brought as much forgiveness as it could, this seemed to be the prologue to **our**  downfall._

_During the first invasion of Arendelle, her convent was turned into an infirmary for the sick and wounded, taking in all and every fallen man, child, and woman. She often sent letters to my wife and my wife only, making paragraphs and novellas about the drudgeries she experienced in the county of Grunvor. According to her ink, an injured soldier from the enemy's ranks asked to repay her with love thoughts and soft words, but she only granted him her friendship. However, it was no more than a month later when the convent was raided and burned by King Lothair's soldiers. With the hands of the enemy at her throat, I now disclose with a quivering pen that my sister was violated in the house of God._

_Gentlemen, we need not dwell upon the opprobrious outcome of this statutory offense. To add insult to injury, her abandonment of the throne swayed civilian parties to believe her a traitor who had an affair after she denied Father Sigurdsson the offing of her son. To all whom it may disgust, she nursed the bastard child as though God himself had carved him out of her own image, taking refugee from one ruined church to another with the boy under her breast. Today would be the anniversary of their abduction; thence, I remember every episodic phenomenon of she and it as if it'd all been born yesterday with the new morning. Nothing from that first and last day she wrote me, along with nothing that's ever happened to me since, has ever been so frightening._

_She penned me her condition in jagged ink, begging that I take the child, that I love him as she had loved him, but I received the letter one hour too late. Thereupon the glorious day of Arendelle's first victory, her boy was taken from her. Of what became of my sister, I do not know. Make no misinterpretations when I say that it is pathetic and terribly galling to reflect that I had spent all my years avoiding her when such lethal events were under happening in the background. There I sat, churning my fingers over a lifetime of family resentment, while she was being made to crawl on her knees for bread crumbs with her child in one arm and Arendelle tearing off the other._

_In fact, when I look back at the beginning of our divide, I am struck not by her initial abandonment of the crown, but how successfully I ignored her emotional recoil away from the world. None but I had sensed the unfilled space between her status as a betrothed princess and the unspoken words of her own longing. None but I had seen the discongruity between my father's illusions of royalty and an ordinary young girl_ ―

"―Agdar?"

A soft plea pulled the penner back into his home.

" _Agdar_?"

The king lifted his forehead from his palm to scold the interrupter. "Here, then ― what's happened  _now_?"

His wife stood before him with held breath and wringing wrists, punctuating her sentence with the questions marks in her eyes. "...Should something have happened? I just wanted to know what you've been doing for all these hours. If I've... _disturbed_  you, then I humbly―"

" _No_ ," he ordered, before shame and stutters broke up his voice. "It's  _fine_ , I'm..." He stared at her a while, that stern trait to his face giving over to the patient, loving gaze of a husband. "Stay."

His wife smiled weakly.

"...I'm sorry," he resigned, shoulders all softening down. "This afternoon has been... _tearing_  through my liver like none  _other._  I can't write a single thing worth the ink."

"So I've heard, and in part, do believe...but the flies are in the food again, dear. Perhaps it's a little less of a "torn" liver and more of a torn heart?"

His hands shook. The king wiped the sweat on his brow with the back of his knuckle and chuckled, "Now  _that,_  would be an unaffordable scandal. Torn livers are acceptable in this society, boiled and wrung dry if they like, but kings must bear the hearts of iron, not petticoats. Anything weaker in material would not make a man at all."

"Because weaker material only suits women and their petticoat thoughts," she finished, still rather poised in her offense. "As God forbid a woman who lacked the charm of being weak."

"...Am I quite in trouble?"

"Quite, dear." Her shoulders rose with her breath and fell with that quiet anger that so often became a wife who was hard up in disagreement with her husband. "The first half of your phrase belonged to your father, so I reunited it with its sister, the one he delivered to me on our wedding day."

"Forgive me," King Agdar's face was red with apology, but it did not reach his eyes, reserved as they were for the offense his heart felt. "However, I've never tried to be him."

"And neither would it befit you to echo even one half of him," she countered. She stood like an unsheathed sword, holding her weight with the bearing of a lord.

The king sat, disarmed and boggled, in some melting, senseless passion for her as she asserted herself.

His queen was, on a whole, a woman of passive maidenhood, thin and white like a daffodil, but the edge in her that was in part from the hardness of her experiences bore itself. "...Darling," she gentled, standing like a daffodil once again. "You don't have to weigh your worth on the gender roles your father beat into you; iron doesn't make a king no more than a sword makes a knight." She crossed her hands over her heart and smiled tiredly. "It is his  _love_  for his  _people,_  and his people's love for  _him,_  that makes a king a proper man."

The king searched her face with warmth shining out of his own. He smiled at his paper with a flushed nose, muttering, "So God help me for having fallen in love with you."

The grin on her face spread until it crinkled her eyes. She puckered her lips against her finger, leaning in as if she were smuggling some important secret across the table: "But as it turns out, I can't do much about torn livers, but I wouldn't want yours boiled and wrung dry, either."

A laugh came through his nose, but his eyes were still a little distant―still a little star-like―and similarly dim, too. He returned to his papers after clearing his throat, pretending to page through a stack or two.

She couldn't help but hide a laugh behind her hand as he made a show out of looking as fixed in as his frown, the very thing that mocked his more vibrant demeanor whenever something childish stirred him. On the day of their wedding, he'd come through her father's garden in badges and ribbons. However, his heart had the delicacy of his mother's, while his spine carried the stiff backbone of his father, making him quick to dam up should one vertebrate of his assumed posture snap and spill out all of his quivering insides.

"By the way, dear...have you done anything about  _Kozmotis Pitchiner?_ "

The king's forehead wrinkled until all she could see were blonde eyebrows. "How do you mean?"

"You very well know what I mean," she flustered, wringing her hands again until they were good and swollen. "To allow a function like this to happen, while denying the most fundamental things like better food and extra clothing for the poor dears..."

He sighed. "What was concluded in my absence?"

"Yestermorning, on the heels of your return, I laid out my plans before  _The Ministry of Children and Equality_ ; they were ready for action, and quite well equipped with practicability, but Lord Pitchiner gave me his beady, pitiful eyes like a horse in a ditch, and dissolved all with a speech. His influence over every man in the room is supernatural; it's almost as if he is Pope. You know him better than I do, but I feel that Christmas will have no snow this year even with my function going up."

The king held up a hand, advising her to be kinder to her nervous system. "It's true that resources are harder to finance than a pleasure trip to the castle for one day. As for Lord Pitchiner ― see him as you see everything through the lenses of your unprejudiced heart instead of your skeptical eye. He helped us escape the invasion, and has been trustworthy ever since. You have made an excellent investment, darling. Your proposal, one that was very momentous, has been approved with astounding reception by Arendelle; that speaks volumes. "

She lifted one hand and studied her fingernails before putting them in her mouth. "This is different. I feel like there's a system behind even that."  _'Like some subliminal, special little diversion being milked out for all the civilians to applaud...'_

"Darling, I'll be with you in just a moment," said the king as he licked his thumb and peeled two pages apart, suddenly sucker-punched by prerogatives. "I just need to finish this before sundown."

Such a show of looking fixed in and "hard at it."

The queen looked away, face hard with thought, before giving him both a smile and a frown, as if to say she knew the issue and would draw the sword from the stone for him. "Darling?"

His throat muscles clenched inwards for a moment. "...Yes, dear?"

"Does your "torn liver" have anything to do with  _Liberation Day_?"

He shut his eyes and rested his fist against his mouth. "..."

...She squinted and shook her head. " _Why..._? Why would today be...a  _sad_  memory for you? For any of us?"

The whites of his eyes were reddening, and the saltwater was beginning to strain through them. "Love..." He lifted his mouth from his fist and sat his chin on a knuckle, showing a smile that was stiffer than wood. "This is not a thing I wish to talk about."

"You don't talk about anything at all," she argued. Before she knew it, old memories got a hold of her and she was up and down the room, rehashing the times. "The only  _sad_  memories were of  _Corona_ ripping up everything it could in  _Grunvor,_  and after challenging the castle's gates, they forced us to flee to our ship due to the absolute  _inanity_  of their request for  _hegemony_."

"Darling―"

"Why, Elsa was born in the middle of that  _awful_  snowstorm in our cabinet atop North Mountain; the very one we were forced to hide away in. Of  _course_  she wouldn't remember such a thing, but imagine how traumatic that might've been for an infant?" Her hands began shaking with her. "She was barely two years old when we arrived in Arendelle after liberation; our people were cheering and..." She pressed shaking fingers to her chest, and turned to him with slow, tearful effect. "It was the first time I'd seen her  _smile._  On  _Liberation Day,_  she smiled. I mean, without all that... _confusion_ in her face about what was going on and why it was happening and what-have-you―"

" _Love._ "

She stopped pacing, fingers practically sewn together in their anxiety.

With two cold pebbles for eyes, the King held out his hands and enunciated slowly: "It has nothing―to do―with  _Liberation Day._ " But when he had moved his hand, the queen saw the wet fingerprints left on the glass table.

She half-turned, eyes wide. "...Quite."

"Quite."

Something clicked into place.

The queen folded her dress under her thighs and eased down into a seat by the fireplace, coming slow and calculative in her mission to undo her husband: "So, then...what is it you've been doing for all these hours that has been so important as for you to miss supper with your daughters? You've even missed Elsa's piano recital, the one you swore to attend. You  _knew_  we'd be her only audience."

The man sighed and dropped his quill to clench the space between his eyebrows. "It wasn't  _intended._  I lost track of the  _time._ "

She rolled her ankle in skepticism, translating the phrase of it to be sure: "Then it's not important? Your liver wasn't torn, boiled, and wrung dry?"

"That's not the implication."

"No, darling...it's not," she saddened, returning to the seriousness of the hour. "Yet you're going around like a constipated greyhound. Anna doesn't understand, but Elsa is worried. You've ignored your daughters since sunup, and have written, tossed, clawed up, and rewritten letters in this study since what is nearly sundown." Her eyes were moist. "Why?"

His nostrils seemed to moisten and tremble with the emotions he couldn't swallow. "It's nothing."

The finalization left a silence so loud that it would've taken a choir to try and fill it.

"...Won't you come with us to watch the lanterns light the coast, then?" She abandoned her failed attempt to wrench him open.

"Darling," he mumbled. "I'd like to finish what I've started here."

"I see..." She could do nothing.

The king tapped his pen against the desk, paying attention to nothing but her ankles. Declaring defeat, she leaned back in her seat, while her husband slumped back in his chair. She sat looking at her significant other with her mind going quietly to shreds. His arm on the desk looked untrustworthy ― as if it guarded the letter from her, and something deeper.

Her whisper barely made it into the room: "...Is this about your sister, and her orphaned war child?"

A breath came out of him then―that breathless, strained rasp he always made whenever the more sensitive sides of his personality surfaced―but he bit his knuckles to suck that breath back, to hold it down,  _to dam it._

"...Darling?"

Her husband slowly brought his fingers together in front of him, and stared at her with pink eyes. "What made you think of this?"

The unused tears in hers shined like underwater sunlight. "Your eyes made me know it..."

Nothing came after that. He didn't break character; she didn't smile under her dimples; she didn't analyze the folded, trembling hands that sat on the table like the last walls he had left to hold up. Just, "I'm sorry," and a hand on his arm. They sat like that, king and queen, husband and wife, with understanding passing through their bodies as the sun began to set on their faces.

"Elsa―..."

This time she smiled under her dimples, sitting as patiently as a buttress as her husband tried to find his footing.

His lips peeled through the saliva, trembling a moment, before he shook his head and closed his eyes. When they opened, it was like a blizzard had migrated through them. "Elsa―...she...made me  _think_  of  _her_  today..."

"Elsa shares her faraway gaze," the queen reminded, holding her half of the conversation to keep him berthed.

He dropped his hand and massaged his eyelids with an index finger.

His wife rubbed his sleeve, warming the skin underneath. "May I?"

He nodded with his eyes still hooded.

She slid the letter over to her end of the table with a finger. The white sheet glowed yellow in the sun as she held the words with her hands. She brought a palm of fingers to her mouth. Though it went unwritten, their conclusion came to her completed as she lowered the paper. "You want the men to search the internment camps..."

But she could not be certain that her husband had heard. He had looked away, torn between tears and smiles. The eyes in the sockets were beginning to look unclear, and his voice barely spoke above his own breath when he said, "She's been too hard to look at today. The color of the hair; the little glances out the eyes; don't you understand?" His fingers curled and tightened. "I avoided her because I couldn't bear to see it."

The whisper was so weak, so powerfully powerless, that her legs went weak from it. She watched as his pen took up strides again, stroke after stroke, while teardrops seeped through the paper. She brought his free hand to her mouth and kissed the knuckles, trying to breathe her love into his veins. Her husband, as since their betrothal, was not similar to society's portraits of a king ― nor were the stereotypical values that his father worshiped in any way tailored to fit him.

But...

She looked at his desk, at the picture frame of his father, at all the scattered letters written, tossed, clawed up, and rewritten again, and thought:  _'Letters.'_

His heart has always been stuffed with them, forever attached to words that couldn't bring the happily ever afters his quivering pen bled so much ink for.

"Darling, please understand me when I say this..." The queen held his palm in two of hers, and pressed her face against its heart lines. "To avoid Elsa as you did your sister, is to traumatize yourself one anniversary more..."

"..." His hand opened like a flower, letting the pen roll off the table. Not even the picture of his father could stop his eyes from crying.

"...Oh, my Agdar―"

" _Your Majesty_! Your  _Royal Majesty_!"

The couple jolted at the sound of the  _knock-knock-knock_  attacking the door.

"Goodness, gracious...!" The queen swallowed, holding her bosom. She answered in place of her husband: "Who―...who  _goes_?"

"Kai, Your Majesty! Kai, at your disposal."

"Kai? Oh! Please, come in!"

A very stout man shimmied the door open and peeked in with one hand shading a candle. "Forgive me, but Lord  _Pitchiner_..." he paused to calm himself, throat flushed all the way down to the collarbone. "Lord Pitchiner is...here to see  _His Majesty_."

The queen jumped, now gripping her husband's sleeve. "I beg  _ten thousand_  pardons?"

" _The Keeper of the King's Conscience,_  Your Majesty."

"Christ..." King Agdar sat up, trying to dry his face with a handkerchief.

"What's the meaning of this?" Queen Idunn complained. "What's his purpose of coming here at such an hour?"

"There's been no harm done, Idunn. I summoned the man," he rasped, brain spinning like a ball. Her husband did not want to hear what she thought about his decision, and turned to speak to the Master of the Household only. "Please, let him in."

''Yes, Your Majesty." Kai turned and bowed to the arriver, who all but floated in.

The queen turned with both hands curled up in her lap like dead caterpillars, not wanting to see the man she had to face yesterday.

He stood in the candlelight at the parlor's entrance with his gown fanning out beneath him like a batwing. "How nice," said he, coming forth with his arms folded behind his back. "A perfectly quaint  _King's Study,_  and a wonderful retreat for any sovereign of state."

"My lord," King Agdar addressed, standing. "I am more than happy that you could make it."

When the guest smiled, each tooth looked like the jagged crag of a mountain. The queen hated it. His demeanor was forever gentle, heart pumping with nothing but political affection, but the man looked like a gangly, hanger-shouldered, clay-faced creature. Cursed with the complexion of a rain cloud, he was a ghastly ghoul who was made out of children's little horrors. Yet she never saw any man, not even a minister, look more poised, or cultured, than  _Kozmotis Pitchiner._

"I apologize if I intrude, Your Majesty," he said humbly, parallels of his own reflection walking on every mirror in the room. He suddenly looked like a phantom moving in double-exposure, closing in all around them, making the queen grip the table for her nerves, but when he approached the desk the illusion broke, and he was only but one man with a kind smile.

King Agdar tried to smile back, lips working themselves until they had the right adjustment to them. "Of course not. You are most welcome here."

The king's bones were still wrenched loose from their sockets, but he was glad for his facade of stiffness, because his guest seemed to notice nothing. With an arm under his stomach, the man simply bowed from the waist.

"You are too kind, Your Majesty," he purred. When he opened his eyes to the queen, she looked away and stroked her collarbone. "Whilst  _Her Majesty_  is even... _more_  radiant than she was yestermorning."

The queen patted at her throat before facing him with a timid smile. "And you're... _well_ , I see."

"Yes, I've never been better, but this weather is so terribly dross. I've never liked that halfway mark between summer and autumn; the seed pods of dandelions always stick to the material of my clothing."

"Material..." Realization broke out across the king's forehead in a hot sweat, and he was suddenly up in arms about a fault in his position. "My apologies, but I―haven't properly prepared myself. Allow me to fetch my material before we begin."

"Material?" The queen echoed.

Bracing the arms of his chair, her husband lifted his palms and clapped the wood with a little slap of certitude before pushing himself up. "The library is in the wing of my study, so I should only be a moment. "

The man looked at him, half-sitting, wide-eyed and slackened, as if to mirror the king's anxiety, before shaking his head and throwing his palm in the direction of the study's hall. "No,  _please_ ― take your  _time_. I have no wife or child to attend to, so I have little to be hurrying  _back_  to, Your Royal Majesty."

The king held his belt and bowed with a quiet, "Then excuse me," before walking to his destination with composure. His wife watched him with a red neck, doing little to control her fingers. When the king passed the door frame, the guest turned to the queen with a look that was as warm as a bishop's.

Her chest filled like an air balloon as he stared at her in that perculiar way; the little sunbursts around his pupils reminded her of dead suns, and she hated it. Having enough of his spidery likeness, she shot up and linked her hands together, breathing out with what little breath she had. "What'll have you, Lord Pitchiner? A little  _Glogg_ , perhaps?  _Glogg_  is always good for the soul."

Searching her face, and her form, he tied his fingers across his stomach and crossed a leg, sinking back into the chair like a cat. "No drinks, thank you. They absolutely... _tear_  through my liver."

The queen stared helplessly at her glass goblet; his voice had been so lax, and the irony so well-timed, that she didn't know how to respond. "...Well," she exhaled, trying to not smile with bitterness. "Livers have been torn by less in this study."

"Pardon?"

An answer was not given because her ears pretended to not hear the question. She moved across the room with a false grace, hand picking up a glass goblet while the other dipped a spoon into a bowl of mulled wine. "I'm tempted to have at it myself, if that's fine. Winter's coming in and it will be perfect for the night."

Lord Pitchiner watched her with his cheek leaning on a finger. He then cleared his throat and bent forward as all five fingers joined at the margins. "Your Majesty, I would like..."―he paused for effect, pressing two forefingers together before pointing them at her―"to  _express_  my  _regret_...at the... _unfortunate_  event yestermorning."

She stopped, glass clanking against glass.

"Since, I take it that you have always known my  _sincere_  interest in your propositions. I do not set out to disappoint you, but I am but a tooth comb in a band of chordophones."

Wine purled into a shaking cup. "It's ― quite  _unnecessary_ , my lord. What's passed has passed."

He curled his lip back and shook his head as he began to speak into his lap like a sinner in a confessional: "Your Majesty, I abstained  _entirely_  from voting against you. Why, I could not help but to admire your man-like valor as you declared your proposals, yet my vote was outnumbered by the rest, and each member finalized his opinion. Your second proposal was far more popular, and all shall stand behind your function as a result. You take a revolutionary step, you do; we welcome the barefoot, for the first time, into the castle. The draggers of such feet will be bouncing around and glowing with nothing but love for Their Majesties...as they  _should._ "

The queen stood clutching her spoon. Something was very off; the words were more instrumental than emotional; not as words alone, but in his way of playing them. "It's ended, my lord. There's no need to discuss the mornings in the night."

He sat his ankle on his knee to hold onto the foot of his boot. "I am only trying to show you my support, Your Majesty. However, I must remark that His Majesty revealed his caution on several accounts. How will you force other proposals upon them in the future?"

Her shoulders tensed. "I don't plan to force anything, my lord. It's not in my nature to twist muscles, and nor should it be in the bones of His Majesty's court."

...His arms butterflied open as he bowed from the neck with closed eyes. "I meant no  _harm,_  or  _disrespect,_  Your Majesty. After all, the sun only sets with you."

Her shoulders dropped as she released a breath inside her chest, terrified by her boldness and holding the headache now forming between her temples from it. She could brave him in the courts, but she couldn't brave him behind her own doors.

"This is it."

She turned, her body showing more relief than it should've when her husband stormed in like a thunderbolt. Her relief was bogged down to confusion after noticing the fat book under his arm. "What is that, dear?"

He said nothing as he sat at his desk with it, only stopping in mid-scoot to look up at her.

She frowned.

He put his fist to his mouth to clear his throat, and relaxed his hands on the desk with a sudden self-command. "Darling, I―"

"I see," she smiled grimly. "...Would you like me to leave you two gentleman at it?" Whatever "it" may be.

He nodded, his voice soft with gratitude: "Yes, darling. That would be fitting."

Gripping her goblet, she reluctantly sat it on the counter and placed her hands on her skirt, turning to look Lord Pitchiner square in the face. "I trust that this will not be the last time we cross, Lord Pitchiner."

Fingers arranged in a triangle, he closed his eyes and bowed his head again. "It has been a great honor, Your Majesty."

She smiled politely, closing her hand over her wrist with a brief pressure, and followed her shadow out of the room. As soon as the door closed, and the silence had clicked shut around them―

―" _Valley of the Living Rock_ , an artful index on mystical little trolls and all the stardust in between," Lord Pitchiner summarized, having skimmed the title of the book under the king's elbow. With slow deliberation, he flicked his eyes up to the secondary importance, which was the king's face. "My book has been keeping you company, I see."

Both sitters looked estranged, one's eyes narrowing in the dark like glowing moons while the other sat like a defeaded soldier. The latter walked across the room and accompanied the window without a word.

"That book has been a good friend to me, Your Majesty. I hope it has been just as good of a friend to you."

The king stood looking at the kingdom below him out of half-closed eyes; jaw hard, hands in fists, and heart just as twisted.

Lord Pitchiner's twirling thumbs suddenly stilled. "...What ails you, my King?"

It was plain that the king abhorred his own thoughts, because there was a shadow on his face that had not been there before. "Are you aware that my sister was abducted with her son in the same hour we speak?"

"Ab- _ducted_?" His guest whispered under his breath in a friable, perfect rage as his face twisted up in disgust. "Foreign  _monstrosities_. They are all vile  _orges_ ―"

"It was the  _people_ ," the king silenced. "The  _people_  took my sister and her son."

"...Of  _Arendelle_?" There was a touch of insolence in the man's disbelief, but the king didn't weed it out. "The people of  _Arendelle_  did it? I thought the records confirmed that she left Arendelle before the second war, Your Royal Majesty."

A bitter laugh came huffing out of him. "Confirmed that she―..." The king tilted his head back with the rise and fall of his shoulders. "...I need your assistance."

At this, Lord Pitchiner gentled. "There is no task that I am not capable of doing to oblige you, Your Majesty. How may I be of service? I grant you the whole thing, loyalty and expertise alike." Then the oath changed into a question, albeit one less willing, "...Does it concern the matter of Princess Estine?"

"No." King Agdar's hands met behind his back. "This concerns my daughter... _Elsa_."

 


	3. ✞ S P E A K

"It's  _Liberation Day_!"

Eugene paled. The broth in his mouth was immediately spat back into his bowl.

"Not this," whined the orphan beside him, practically screaming Eugene's thoughts into the atmosphere. "Please, Sister Jensen!" The boy turned to the table of nuns with tears up to his eyes. "I don't want to celebrate this―"

"Quiet!" burped the fattiest nun. "We'll have none of your blasphemies today!" She patted her mouth dry and pointed a breadstick at him. "Bett'ar do what you know best and keep yer' head down befar' you allow any foulness like t'at to come outta yer' mouth again!"

Eugene's table looked on in horror and hunger, their beady eyes unable to part from the grand feast that was laid out before the nuns on the other side of the cafeteria. The junior nun who had been addressed paddled around the vegetables in her soup to make the most of her indifference.

"Old Scottish sellout; she knows the whole thing is a perfectly monstrous conspiracy," whispered the boy at his left, quite mature in his vernacular. "This orphanage is a cabal, and foreign hens like her wouldn't celebrate it if they didn't have whips coming down their backs―"

"You there! What t'ar ya' saying? Do you want to share it wit' the res' of the cafeteria?"

The boy stared at her with a napkin to his mouth before clearing his throat and folding it in his lap.

"...T'at's what I thought." The potbellied nun put her hands on her hips and scanned the cafeteria with one eye. With a meanness trained through fifty years to perify children, she hollered, "Now go  _back_  to yer  _breakfast._ "

Spoons and bowls clattered while sips and smacks replaced the silence. Eugene sighed as he palmed his sleepy tears away, trying his best to stomach his meal; every time that she-hog yelled, his nervous system was shaken out of health.

" _Liberation Day_!" Children started up, sitting their elbows on the tables to talk behind their hands. "I con't v'ait to see the lanterns!"

"But we 'ave to spend it with the likes of  _them._ "

"The nuns?"

"The bastard children of 'da  _traitors._ "

Eugene licked the broth around his chin and sucked his lips back, hesitantly showing his eyes to the group in front of him. Neighbors were dropping whispers in one another's ears and passing insults around the table like notes, chanting,  _"His dad is the reason my dad is dead,"_  before glaring at him. The pushover of a boy curled an arm around his head and his bowl as if his whole society was now protected by a Trojan wall.

"Don't  _look_  at him," berated girls who were half in love with him, yet they were far too beside themselves with nationalism to parade it. "Don't even brush  _hands_  with him! He's filth!"

Eugene knuckled a sweat drop off his nose, slumping down in his seat as to not be seen. His nerves couldn't handle being sized up by others and picked apart by the eyes. They made him painfully aware of every fault inside his body, every flaw inside his DNA, his veins, his personality, and most compromising of all, his rank. No one knew or accepted him, but he did not want to be known. To shave off his skin and zip himself up in someone else's body was a dream that slept in his cranium for eons. Such privilege would free him of his grimy, poverty-sooted flesh and worthless chicken-bones, followed by an incision on the brain that would slice off every nerve-ending that made him so sensitive.

"Enough of this. I don't v'ant to sit here anymore," announced the ringleader of the conversation.

Table mates moved with him, taking their egos to more like-minded territory. Orphans who were either foreign, native, or mixed began to divide themselves in the cafeteria, making their own re-adaptation of the country's apartheid. Eugene scrutinized them carefully ― the way of ignorance, the way of being; their eyes reflected nothing but the xenophobia that had been carefully manufactured by adults. Even little Stig, Eugene's only confederate, distanced himself to avoid being caught on the wrong side of the segregation. Other war children bordered Eugene like pigs in a stye, but they never spoke to or for him. Being outcasts together was nothing more than a trial that reminded them how much they hated themselves and each other.

_'Why does it have to be like this?'_  Eugene dried his mouth on his sleeve.  _'Why does it **always**  have to be like this?'_

He wanted to be back on the bandwagon that brought him here, rolling through meadows and valleys without an eye turned towards society. The children who had ridden with him were sent to what the coachman called  _"internment camps,"_  while others were thrown behind the gates of a place called a  _"mental institution,"_  but his unfortunate bunch had been dropped in the lap of  _Mercy's Sisters,_ and he couldn't think of a worse torture yet.

"This day does well to remind us of our inconveniences, Sisters."

Eugene looked up and glanced at the thirteen women across the room. They were all hot with conversation:

"A most inconvenient responsibility!" One gasped as she looked into Eugene's direction. "They're baggage on our shoulders, and mine are too old to be carrying much more. God Bless the day they are deported. We can't keep the fights down, so it's best that they leave the system entirely."

"Deported, Sister Agnes? In all the world, do you really think the Storting will go through with that kind of foul play?"

"The Council of State has brought it to light, so why shouldn't the Storting bring it to fruition?"

"What Sister Erne means to say, is that they like to be squeaky clean in their doings. The king and queen are far too neutral on this matter―"

"Silent, is more like it!" The shouter's eyes shook like eggs ready to hatch.

"Sister Agnes," calmed another, "you must keep your fire to yourself. To speak illy of the king and queen is  _treasonous._ "

"Sister Erne, I do not speak illy; I speak truthfully," she raged, just about blue with it. "They have no side; none at t'all, but the Storting will not allow them to ignore this if it's put up for a referendum―"

"Yes, but not without a fight."

"True! A wedge in a door is enough to keep it unclosed―"

"Your metaphors are something terrible, Sister Annvor. There's nothing poetic about politics. Half the country will not, I repeat, will  _not_  be on their side if they choose to object."

"I agree; I do quite agree with you all," chittered another in her baby-doll voice, trying to stitch things up before they fell apart. "It's hairy, you see. They do not want to anger the people or the sitters of the Storting, but they have a different mind of what is right, so they can't quite go in as they are. It's best to just look frazzled on the outside―"

"Sister Bergveig, for how long can silence be affordable? How long until pitchforks and torches are at their gates?"

"Your thoughts are damnable!" The nerves crawling under Sister Erne's skin surfaced. "Anymore of that talk and you might as well...might as well hang up your veil!"

"You are taking me too personally; I am only speaking from Arendelle's perspective of things."

"Oh, stop it! You and I both know the kingdom of Arendelle is not full of barbarians. Why, most people here are kind; many do not participate in hatred. Discriminatory thoughts may be born through a type of groupthink behavior, but putting hands on others is not practiced here. If any rotten apples are in the kingdom, then they've come from outside of it."

"Sister Ernes, that is exactly my point. It's not the kingdom's capital itself, but Arendelle's  _lesser lands,_  which are wrought with segregation between angels, devils, victims, veterans, traitors, dirty bloods, and foreigners. So many of them have migrated here, bringing all their follies and sob stories with them. Any human being pushed against a wall will act as their primitive ancestors had, and Arendelle has its civilians and barbarians, whom are all quick to follow the opinion of their neighbor, forever living in fear of having their own minds―"

" _Enough_."

The nuns shuffled and turned to see Mother Superior, and were immediately shaken down by the sight of her. She was a banshee even in the morning sun, and the women couldn't bare to look at the flabs of skin hanging from her cheekbones like rotten meat.

"Politics are not our bread and butter, and they certainly are not for the tongues of nuns," she spat, lips trembling with old age. "Leave them at your nightstand, if you will, where you can think about them under your nightcaps, but we'll have no talk of this in the cafeteria. Is that understood?"

The nuns bowed their heads as if they never had thoughts, opinions, or independence. "Please forgive us, Mother Superior."

Mother Superior looked them full in the faces that they would not show her and excused herself with a haggard walk. Her hand followed the wall as she staggered, the body she dragged growing supernaturally older by the day.

When she was sure to be gone, Sister Annvor twisted her napkin in her hands. "Why, she's a hypocrite, she is! She was just lecturing the  _halvdels_  about their place in society last night, and now she's lecturing us about our place in our own conversation. Perhaps she's senile; word has it that she spends her nights moaning over a flowerpot."

With her eyes in her book, the eldest of the group silenced Sister Annvor with her hand. " _Compose_  yourself, Sister. You must keep your personality down. The day is just beginning, after all."

"But Sister Solberg―"

"That'll be all."

Sister Jensen, who'd been absent from the conversation, slowly leveled her eyes with Sister Solberg's, before looking down and nudging her spoon back into her mouth. The other women resumed position and took up their forks.

"I don't undar'stand...what 'tis it n'ao?  _Liberation Day,_  I mean."

The scattered outcasts at Eugene's table glared at the girl who spoke so suddenly to them now, but Eugene gazed with curious, guarded eyes, interested in what she might say.

"...Are you a Scott?" a boy discerned. "What are  _you_  doing  _'ere_? Go over there with the others; your type is 'posed to be chummy with Arendelle's natives."

"But I want ta' be 'ere with you, like you choose ta' be 'ere with the oth'ars," she pleaded, before glaring at them with an "unladylike" defiance: "I'm not movin' my bowl jus' cus' everyone else is! I already done made my place."

Her offender scoffed and batted his bowl away, causing it to hit Eugene's and wrack the poor boy's nerves. "You think we choose to be together like this? Kicked around together? Made to be conjoined at the hip? I don't like a single person here; all of 'em give me trouble. That boy there?" He pointed to Eugene. "He pisses his bed every night, makin' that Gothel creature come in and wake us up to see him beaten. As if we don't got better things to do, like sleepin'! And he shakes funny, won't speak much because he don't got a voice."

Eugene darted his eyes to the side of the table, glaring at the vomit in the wood. His hands were clenching his pants―

"You got sump'tin on your tongue, Herbert? A fire ant, maybe?" the boy egged, pretending to widen his eyes with anticipation. "Spit it out, then. Go on. I'm a-wait'tin'!"

Eugene bit the inside of his cheek. The nuns said he was too sensitive for his gender, too sensitive to survive the times, and he always thought them right, because confrontations like these trampled on what little bravery he had. Why, he could only face threats by putting his head in the sand and not facing them at all―

"Go on, then!" The boy banged on the table. "Show yourself to me!"

...With a furiously shaky hand, Eugene picked up his spoon and sipped his broth.

"Tch!" His bully leaned back. "See? N'awt a voice in the throat or a brain in the skull―"

" _Please,_ " interrupted the Scottish orphan, her eyes as sad as she could make them. "Will someone tell me what tha' day  _means_  ta' you?" She looked at Eugene. "Ta'  _all_  of you?"

The table continued to stare, contrasting and comparing her kindness to the barbaric stereotypes associated with her red curls. Eugene just sank between the shoulders of his jacket and continued to spoon his bowl, wanting no part and surely, no role.

"C'mon, then!" The girl's dragon scales began coming out. "Everyone's got t'a  _tongue!_ "

Reluctant to speak, the eldest of the outcasts began to do just that: " _Liberation Day_  is the free pass day."

"Free pass?" Her eyes brightened. "Aie! That be good, then?"

"Good? It's perfectly monstrous! The "legitimate" people in the country sentimentalize it, but illegitimate "others" are targeted by veterans sick with post-traumatic stress every year. Even the children are beasts about it; everyone can parade Arendelle's triumphs in broad daylight and exploit its frustrations at sundown. The  _Crown_  tries to act like they don't know what's happening, because it's so damn disgraceful to them."

The girl was too young to get the whole of it, but her heart knew the graveness when the other children exploded into tears.

"The swine feces wouldn't come out of my hair last year!" bawled one girl.

"We're going to be dirty before the day ends, and the nuns won't let us wash off afterwards―"

"It's all because of our v'athers―"

"Shut up! Gonna get us in trouble, you will!"

"But we'll be taken out in the streets, and you know what they'll do; you know what they'll do!"

"I hate my v'ather―"

"―March us out like ants―"

"―I hate my ma'ther―"

"―throw mud, spit, and food at us―"

"―for being traitors―"

"―then the nuns will act incapable of stopping it―"

"―and I hope they're both dead as dogs."

The screech of a chair ripped their ears in half. "Quiet! QUIET, I said! This isn't a  _bloody_  choir! What be wrong with you halvdels?!"

The war children kept their heads down.

"But, Sister Agatha...?" The redhead began, motioning to all the children around them with a baffled smile. "Everyone in tha' cafa'teria is talkin―"

"All I hear is you all  _whinin'_  and carryin' about!" she deferred.

Sister Solberg lowered her chin and looked over the rims of her glasses, frowning.

"You want a lashin' or two across that freckled bottom ah' yer's, gal?" the tubby nun went on with her threats, giving the cafeteria the very worst of herself. "Because I can do it me'self! I can take that bottom and leave a whole tattoo on it!"

Her spectator sighed as she folded the legs of her glasses, placed them on the table, and laid her book face down. "Sis―ter  _Agatha..."_

Sister Agatha blinked.

"You are too _loud._  How could children respond well if all you do is bark like a dog?"

"Wit' t'all due respect, Sistar...chil'ren are meant ta' be seen, not heard. This mouthy little youngin' shouldn't be talkin' back ta' begin with!"

"Yes, but they are also meant to  _listen._  How do you propose they do that if all they hear is the dull ringing left in their ears by your  _pterodactyl_ screaming?"

"I was...jus' tryin' ta' make t'ings  _easier_  for you, Sistar Solberg," she faltered, humbling herself cautiously.

"Such lap-dogs," she grunted between her teeth, taking up her novel again. "Sit down, Sister Agatha; that'll be all from you."

Eugene watched as Sister Agatha sank back down into her seat to nibble on a carrot in scorned silence. The children at his table wet their lips with their broth while the red-haired girl picked at her bread, but no one spoke another word about Liberation Day.

After only five minutes, the young nun with the baby-doll voice shined a brighter topic onto her table: "Do you think we will be seeing Princess Anna on the balcony tonight, Sister Solberg?"

Sister Solberg's nostril twitched as she turned the page of her book and said, "I wouldn't bet your stars on it, girl. We will be seeing Princess Elsa, however."

"Oh! What a darling, that one! She's so  _very_  fair―"

"Yet she gets that trait from neither of her parents."

"That's not  _entirely_  true; King Agdar is a bit of a blonde, and Queen Idunn―...well, she's not as handsome, but Princess Elsa has the shape of her face. Perhaps the eyes stand further apart, and...―Oh! Here, then! Do you recall King Agdar's sister? What a picture she was! Her hair was as yellow as fairy dust ― the mother's, too!" She pressed her fork to her lips. "Though, the eyebrows matched in comparison; Princess Elsa's are darker than her scalp, which is peculiar...yet satin blonde she is, and nonetheless fair. Imagine her older! Imagine how beautiful she will be! Suitors will come flocking to her feet like geese before winter!"

The talk from here became light, but the information about those responsible for his conditions sat on Eugene's heart. "Princess Elsa..." he tasted the name, and immediately wanted to vomit it.  _'By the time I'm grown, she'll be the one putting her paws on my problems, and I can bet that she'll handle them no better than her own two folks.'_

The boy had no rosy delusions about the royal party; this was not because they were tyrants, but because they didn't repair his crumbling life with a determined moral obligation to fix it. He didn't have a clue of what went on behind  _their_  caste walls, but they most likely spent their hardships drinking out of gold cups while their daughter dined in the finest clothes with the finest goblet, all shimmery and gleaming with an embroidery of gemstones across her pretty neck.

"She probably doesn't know anything about dirty clothes and flies in a soup," Eugene grunted, the image casting a dark cloud over his own peasant future.

As nasty thoughts formed in his brain, he wasn't able to stop his shoulders from jumping at the disgusting sound of, "Have you got somethin' ta' say 'bout our prin― _cess_ , Fitzherbert?"

Fear ran from the crown of his head to his chicken-bone ankles. The boy addressing him was Gottmar.

"She not good enough for you, eh? No, that's not it. We know your kin likes our blondes; can't 'ave 'em in your own country, so you 'ave to come ovar here and take them. Well, you're not 'aving no blondes, so you beddar keep the fairest one in Arendelle outta your mouth."

Even though nausea was making a whole volcano at the bottom of Eugene's stomach, he swallowed down the magma and acted like he couldn't hear him.

"I'm talking to you,  _half-blood_!"

Water hit the back of Eugene's head in tidal waves. The girls at his table squealed and balked back, arms open in disbelief at the water soaking down their shirts. When they sneered up at Eugene, his eyes were unseeing and shaking, like a puppy who'd been kicked in the stomach by a playground of children.

After Gottmar finished emptying his cup with his squadron, he chucked it at the edge of Eugene's table, missing his wrist by an inch. "That's for your dead mother, half-blood. A toast to all the traitors no longer here."

The nuns pretended to not see this, choosing to stay silent as their forks continued to clank against their plates.

"What was that,  _Fitz_ ―herbert?" Gottmar mocked, putting his hand under his earlobe. "I can't heaar~ yoouu~!"

Eugene sat in his humiliation, shoulders hiked up to his neck. Water dripped from his bangs and blurred together with his tears.

"Speak  _up_ , halvdel!"

Eugene zipped his lips up with his teeth, unable to stop his chin from quivering.

"Look at 'im; tight as a duck's butt-hole, he is. You wanna do something about it?"

Eugene gripped his napkin so hard that his table mates could see the veins bubbling in his hand. They mutely watched him shiver because they were too afraid to sacrifice themselves.

"You ain't gonna do nottin', because you're nev'var gonna be nottin'."

Eugene shook his head, ripping at his lip with his teeth for a voice to tear through, for some voice of courage, for any voice at all―

"I'll scratch your eyes out with a wire hanger if you don't keep 'em where you got 'em."

The cafeteria was as quiet as a battle-field after Gottmar's threat. There was no laughter from the onlookers or the bullies, the latter of which hated and goaded like men at an execution.

At last, Sister Solberg rose from her table like a kraken as her elbows shook with her knees. "And that ― is ―  _enough._ " She scanned the cafeteria with bulging, black eyes, lips curled down at their corners in the expression of a bull dog's. "I will not  _tolerate_  threatening remarks in this―"

"NEH!"

There was an explosion of hysterics and other dramatics: a bowl shattered, a girl screamed, and a brown head ripped through the crowd.

" _Fitzherbert_!" Sister Solberg shook. "Fitzherbert, stop this  _instant!_ "

Eugene ran, tripped, and crashed into a trash can before he could make the exit. The boy and his efforts went down together, and Gottmar laughed at the failure, telling him that candle-wax wings weren't good enough to break free from a weak, eggshell heart. Trembling from elbow to ankle, Eugene pulled off the hair in his face with shaky hands, both eyes deliriously watered from the brunt of the fall.

"Fitz― _her_ ―bert," Sister Solberg emphasized in concern, lifting her gown to climb down the steps. "Stay right where you are―"

"Shut  _up_ , you ol'  _hag_!"

Sister Solberg stopped in her tracks, face made older by the scream. Eugene pushed off his palms and tripped out of the cafeteria with tears shedding behind him, sprinting all the way down the halls as Sister Solberg's voice chased after him. He whirled past junior nuns sweeping the halls without stopping to heed their calls.

"Fitzherbert!" Sister Solberg cried with them. "Fitzherbert, I command you to stop!"

He flew straight into a closet and slammed the door, shutting the last of the light out with it. Heart still going like a sledgehammer, he backed up until his tailbone hit the wall of the wardrobe. Shadows moved under the door, producing a kind of shadow-play effect as they flitted in and out, meeting and separating over hisses of conversation.

"―Look in the dormitories―"

"―No, no, no! He must be down here!"

"He's hiding close by―"

"―I want you to bring him to me and have him  _beaten_!"

Eugene gritted his teeth in terror, flattening himself against the wall. The hisses stopped and the shadows lifted from the door, disappearing in a pitter-patter of feet. He let out a shuddery sigh and held his head between his fists, sinking down the wood until his bottom hit the floor. His fists began beating against his temples as he took this moment to cry and laugh at this deranged liberation.  _  
_

Yes, he was alone ― but he was alone  _and free._ No eyes, no judgements ― he didn't have to care what they were going to say.

The world blurred over as he cried himself to sleep, fading into a peaceful silence without nuns, politics, or bullies. In his dreams, he shaved off his skin with a scalpel and watched ribbons of flesh peel from the bone like candle-wax. Then he took the blade to his face and carved out his future, his independence, his courage, his nobility, and gave his smile a new set of teeth. He shimmied his dirty feet into a pair of polished shoes and zipped himself up in someone else's body, drinking out of the finest goblets with the finest clothes, free of his own poverty-sooted complexion and worthless bones. But the hands were too cold, the hair too blonde, and the nap ended when a slit of light became a burning sunset in his face.

Eugene forced an eye open against the rays, waking up to a shadow that stood in the door of the closet. The shoulders framed the sunlight like devil horns, but he couldn't wipe his eyes fast enough to realize that it was―

"Out." Mother Superior.

He tripped out, having been thrown into the stomachs of nuns. They closed around him and held him tight, eager to whack him should he fight. Mother Superior's face was being boxed out of the circle, but he could see her looking down her nose at him. He tried to look every nun in the face, tried to ask them to wait, but their expressions wouldn't tell him anything, so emotionless and blank were they as they wrestled him out into the open.

"Out! Out, the lot of you! Half-bloods must stay behind the class until told otherwise!"

Children were being herded into the corridor like cattle by Sister Agatha. Eugene stood there like a fool with tombstones for feet, barely budging when he was shoved into the hallway of sweaty bodies and feverish skin. He fought shoulders and thighs as he passed through the main vein of the beehive, trying to see over the tops of heads. The boy could hardly see the color of his own boots before him, let alone Mother Superior's shrinking back as she led the children to the open doors. The younger nuns began passing out lanterns, skipping the few war children there were, and telling them to stand at the back of the line.

_"But we'll be taken out in the streets, and you know what they'll do; you know what they'll do!"_

Eugene's steps fell away, legs becoming limp and sluggard. His panic took shape, becoming pitchforks and pig feces; he thought about it over and over again―thinking, thinking, thinking...―staring out of the window―staring into the future. The nuns weren't looking ― the hallway had enough bodies to camouflage him ― and Mother Superior and Sister Solberg were at the head of the assembly. He hesitated for five minutes, and then, shivering, about-faced and ducked down, slipping between legs and knees like a rabbit in a burrow.

"Please be careful with your lanterns, children!" sang the younger nuns. "We won't be able to pass out too many more, but each Sister will light them for you when the ceremony begins. Remember to wave to King Agdar and Queen Idunn―"

"And Princess Elsa!" announced Sister Bergveig with jitterbugs of excitement running all over her. "Princess Elsa will be gracing us, too―"

"Sister Berg― _veig_ ," Sister Solberg grumbled, lips frozen in a smile. "Please control your  _sprightliness._  The children have enough for all of us, thank you."

Eugene cut the corner and tip-toed as far away as he could, before breaking out into a run and searching for an exit. Bursting through flap doors with his jacket flying behind him, the boy's eyes ripped through the scenery―from dormitories to bathroom corridors―before stationing on the staircase that led to a backdoor. He hurried down the rickety steps, dodging a pail of water, and began working the wooden latch which would set him free. He looked around for an object that would help him pry the door open, panicking when he could find nothing. The garden was just outside, and beyond that the gate, then the sunset would be waiting for him, and the horizon would be all his―

"Do you think yourself wise?"

Eugene whipped around in a sweat, eyes zigzagging the room before landing on the nimble little figure cloaked under gown and veil. "S...Sister Jensen..."

The nun's face was tighter than a twisted muscle, and her throat was red with veins. "Do you think yourself wise...for putting me in this situation?"

"No, I―...I-I..." He didn't know what she meant, what to say, what to do; he just wanted to stay alive.

"They have eyes,  _all_  around...crawling in the walls like little  _nightmares,_ " she spluttered, spit filming the corners of her mouth. Her chin was pocked in dimples.

"Please," he begged, finding her mad. "Let me  _go!_  I can't take it here anymore!"

She watched his eyes with a teary light behind her own, before drawing in a breath, and yelling until the veins popped out of her forehead: "Mother  _Superior_! Mother  _Superior_! Mother  _Superior_!"

"NO―"

"Mother  _Superior!_  Mother―"

"You  _impudent_  CHILD!" Sister Solberg came stumbling down the steps, out of breath and out of patience. "What is the meaning of this, girl?! What business do you have down here?"

She dropped her breath and turned her head away as if snapping out of a fever, before holding her forehead to choke out: "The  _Fitzherbert_..." She swallowed, recomposing herself, and started over: "The Fitzherbert child was trying to elude you."

Sister's Solberg's face rotated, stilled, and then blanked. With quaking fists and knocking knees, Eugene kept his chin in his chest to avoid her gaze. It was tempting, as of now, to fold up into a ball and dissolve on the floor, but he knew he'd have to brave the next few minutes.

"Speak plainly, boy. What is your explanation?"

The boy's lips curled back around his teeth. "I jus'..."

" _What?_ "

"I-I jus'..."

"Speak  _up._ "

Tears ran down his nose and dripped off the ball of his throat. "...I jus' wanted to be  _free_..."

"..." Sister Jensen looked at Sister Solberg with a hand over her mouth.

"..."

A bony hand seized the front of Eugene's collar and lured him into a cupboard. He was stuffed inside like a sack of potatoes as he fought and resisted, and when he looked up to beg with them, Sister Solberg's shadow darkened everything he could see.

"Foolish child," she rasped. "You think you're the only one...who wants to be  _free?_ "

Eugene hollered as the doors were shut on him, shutting the last of the light out with them.

.

.

.

.

.

_(-SCREAM-)_


	4. ♕ C O N C E A L

Screaming.

"If I may have your attention―"

―The same―

"―on this matter―"

―endless―

"―and its importance."

― **screaming.**

"You will be graded on comprehension skills."

Over.

"Your ability to _listen_."

And over.

"Your _competency._ "

And **over** ―

"And most importantly, your undivided _attention._ "

―a **g** a **i** n.

"Have you heard what you have been told to do?"

_'Make it stop.'_

"...Your Royal Highness?"

 _'Heavenly Father, please make it stop_.'

"Dear―"

― _'Make_ ― _'_

"―Princess―"

―' _it_ ― _'_

"― **ELSA.** "

"STOP!"

A ruler swatted the table with a _crack._

Snapped from her thoughts like a branch from a tree, the child gazed at her governess with a shattered conscience. The world first went a fading grey, like a vignetted image blurring in and out of her retinas, but when clarity returned, she could see the foggy silhouette of a body trembling behind a counter.

Panic kicked in.

"Prin―cess... _Elsa_."

The ossified muscles under that useless membrane called flesh wouldn't move, but she tried to put her vocal chords to work: "...Y―...Y― _Ye_ s'm―"

"Stop." A ruler swatted the blackboard this time. "What has your father discussed with you?"

Her throat felt like bark when she gulped.

The governess towered over her like a Gothic Cathedral. "That the world has no room for _hesitation_ ," she sermonized. "That you must speak as a lady should. That you must carry yourself with seemliness. Would Queen Idunn stutter before a table of men?"

"N―..." Stop. Ice the nerves. Raise the head. Fold the hands. Speak like a lady. _Speak without a voice._ "No, ma'am."

"And did you hear what I said about directions?"

Repeat. "No, ma'am."

"Were you listening to me at all?"

Confess. "No, ma'am."

"Because you were concentrated on something other than your painting?"

Hesitate.

"Your High― _ness_."

"Yes, ma'am."

"The lantern ceremony will be upon us when the clock strikes nine, and Miss Gerda will be summoning you for your wardrobe before six. With this in mind, you must participate until sundown. Is that quite reasonable to you?"

"I—..." Her mind blanked. Protocols forgotten. A drop of sweat slipped down her temple as she ran through a mental checklist of verbs.

What was the most appropriate phrase for an adult to use? _"I apologize," "I'm sorry,"_ or _"forgive me?"_ What did her mother utter when her father criticized her nerves?

"I... _apologize_ , Governess," the girl announced with her chin high, cheeks pink, and throat beating with an anxiety she couldn't swallow. "I hereby promise that it will not concur again." A firm nod finalized the pledge. However, very much like a younger model of her mother, the girl looked similar to a frightened Juliet struggling to remember the lines in her role, and her arms were pinned to her sides like a toy soldier on stage.

"...I believe the word you meant to use was _'occur,'_ Your Highness," the strict leviathan scoffed, both amused and deflected by Elsa's comical imitation of her father's asceticism.

Not wanting to compromise her self-esteem any further, the governess evened her approach by asking the child what she had been staring at.

Elsa blinked, slowly losing the tension that so often became her father, and allowed herself to be the barely six year old girl she was. "...Well..." Her head lowered as two fingers prodded together with the antsy mannerisms of Queen Idunn. "It was—"

"Pause."

The princess held her breath in her cheeks.

"Now round your back and sit confidently."

She rounded her shoulders, mocking the straightness of a flagpole.

The tutor's eyes seemed to turn into smiles before she cleared her throat. "Now I want you to articulate yourself assertively when I ask you this question: 'What were you _staring_ at for all this time'?"

"I was—..." Stop. Swallow. Assert. "It—...wasn't something I could... _look at_ , ma'am." She couldn't get the words out; what _had_ she been hearing and why did it sound so _bloodcurdling_?

The governess eyed her skeptically. Elsa eyed her eyes. The bruised wrinkles underneath one of them — bruises that looked inflicted by a fist — reminded her of the skin on shriveled fruit, and the child's stomach growled like a bear, automatically fantasizing about raisins to eat before dinner. "Then why, Your Highness, have you been staring at the window all evening?"

Elsa frowned at the ground, forehead becoming all lines and hardworking thoughts. After securing her answer's rationale, she answered her with an assertive response: "I was listening to the trees cry."

"...The _trees_?"

Her confidence turned to sand. "...Yes, ma'am."

"You are hearing... _trees_ cry?" she repeated, though with a little more sarcasm on her part.

Elsa rubbed her plump cheek, feeling a flurry of warmth spread under the skin, and nodded.

"And in which direction are these... _crying_ trees?"

This request only reddened her embarrassment, but she tucked a strand behind her headband and gestured to the window, pinpointing a lonely little hill where a family of abbeys sat neck in neck.

"Well, of _all_ places..." The woman's face went grey. "The trees or that _nunnery_?"

"The trees, ma'am." Sensing her confusion, Elsa churned her paintbrush with both hands, lips puckered into a contemplative pout. "Well — that is to say —...at first, I thought it was the houses, but... _houses_ don't cry, because houses don't need oxygen." She peeked back at her tutor with a peek under her bangs, as if to be asking with intrigue: _"Do they?"_

"Tch..." A laugh curled the woman's tongue before she harrumphed it back down. "Trees don't cry either, dear. Only women and children."

Elsa frowned at her knees with a dimpled chin, before looking up self-consciously.

"Yes?"

"..."

"Go on."

"...What about the _men_?"

The governess made the sound of an unhappy pig. "Oh, penguins would fly should men ever _allow_ themselves to."

Elsa faced the hill with glazed eyes, holding a finger to her chin in wonder. Her governess watched the unanswered questions punctuate her posture and bring her shoulders a little closer to sadness.

"That charterhouse you see before you is what is called a convent, Your Highness."

"...Con...vent. Con— _vent_ ," Elsa parroted, using a nod to hyphenate the syllables. When she realized she didn't know the word, she looked back at her governess with a shamefaced look. "What's a... _con—vent_ , Miss Dietrich?"

The governness stared at her with an expression she couldn't read. She flung out her wrist and looked down to adjust the glove as if to keep the girl from seeing her eyes. "A _convent_ is where children go when they need living quarters and supervised care."

"Su—per—vised _care_?" Elsa's right eye squeezed up at the foreign terminology. "What's _that_?" she grumbled to no one but herself under her breath.

"They're orphanages for orphans, Your Highness," she rephrased, having heard the mumble.

The princess gave her a guilty smile that seemed to say she wanted to hide her face. "Does—... _"_ Elsa closed her eyes, trying to remember the relationship between the first and second syllables, before relocating the hyphen and bobbing her head to the full pronunciation: "... _su_ — _per—_ vised _care_ mean their mama's and papa's go with them to the convent?"

The fingers on the woman's glove twitched. Elsa could hear the squeeze between leather and skin being wrung out of her wrist as the grip tightened. "They are lost, Your Highness." Coldness and disdain poured through a resevoir of formality. "Lost with the flags of sunken ships."

"...Sunken ships?" Elsa murmured, her face a picture. Cannonfire and slewing swords echoed on the ocean floor of her mind, but they wouldn't rise above the noise and assume an image. She pressed on her thumbs and fingers, pushing such anonymous memories to the back of her mind. "Who lost them?"

The glow in the woman's eyes danced like candlelight. "A _Gabrielle_ who couldn't protect them, Your Highness."

She nodded. Pretended to understand. She didn't understand at all, but maybe ships and parents were too heavy for angels to carry back to shore without breaking their wings.

Miss Dietrich's gaze fell on the window with the accusatory glare of someone who'd been hurt by that "convent." But they didn't cry, and didn't need oxygen, so they couldn't get up and physically harm anyone, either.

Elsa fidgetted on her stool. "Wouldn't..." She trailed off, knowing it to be a kind of rule-breaker to bring the question full circle: "...Wouldn't the children...be _lonely_?"

The slow, reminiscent fingers dragging down the woman's throat curled around the collar of her undershirt. "I suppose it would depend on whether you look at it as one possibly being lonely on the _outside,_ or on the _inside_?"

What was the difference? Their families were in neither. "Both sides."

" _Well_...several _nuns_ live there with them, each with a personality that's different from what's often italicized in prayer. It wasn't always as such, but the world is moving in a compromised direction. However,"—the hand suddenly lifted from the neck in a snap of sudden control—"You shouldn't be hearing _crying_." She set the hand down and glared at her. "The canyons may echo everything, but no grieving is that loud."

Elsa turned back to the window with a straighter neck, keyed up on curiosity and the need to know. Cries should be very loud if _Gabrielle_ lost their parents without bothering to dive back down for them. "And only children and women cry, not men and trees..."

The mistress's eyes drifted over her blonde braid and blue dress before looking down to reinstate their positions. "Let us not speak about the lowborn, Your Highness. What's become of your progress so far?"

Elsa flinched, looking back around with the swing of her braid, before stooping over her painting and teething on the bridge of her finger. She reached for her paintbrush and smiled apprehensively at the viewer in hopes of being pardoned for incompletion. The governess, however, looked around her arm to admire her painting. Pencils and watercolors had been used alike, giving personality and realism to the shapes she stroked. The beginnings of a sunset were being overlaid on the sky, while an unfinished castle sat in the heart of a mountain. There was emotion in every color — a story attached to every heart vein in the palm that painted; the girl was putting her very organs on the canvas by unraveling the playful world kept braided between her thoughts.

—"Ah," voiced the governess, a kind of finality elevating her voice as she discovered Elsa's faults. "Not those colors, Your Highness; they're too bold. You must use more ladylike colors."

The hand holding the paintbrush lopped like a flower. Elsa looked back and sought what little emotion she had on her face, eyes wet with confusion. "But these are—..."

"Yes?"

She became inaudible: "The colors in my head..."

"You must learn to flatten them."

Elsa's face went limp, as if all the bones in it had been stepped on.

_Flat._

She inspected her painting objectively, and found nothing but herself in it. Although she did not understand where her faults lied, it was the first time she knew that part of herself would have to conceal some other part of herself she liked best.

"Your Highness?"

Timidly: "Yes'm?'

"Be a good girl and do as you are told."

Fearing failure, she examined the palette before her after being told to abbreviate herself. _Violet. Green. Ladylike. Flat._ The paintbrush trembled in her hand as she chose the violet, mopping up just enough to smear it across the background of her canvas.

"Lovely," the governess cooed.

Elsa relaxed her shoulders, knowing the portrait's heart had been cropped and abridged, but still drawing validation from the fact that she'd be rewarded for her competence.

"Continue on in that way."

The activity was thenceforth continued in silence, a few _very good's_ and _do-this-instead's_ coming and going between the minutes, but something far more personal and improperly timed came and stayed like a doorstopper between a three-inch gap:

"Miss Dietrich?"

The governess dabbed her thumb on her tongue and turned a page in her book. "Your Highness?"

Head tilted as she painted, Elsa's clarion voice chimed with an innocent nonchalance: "Do you like your life?"

Her mistress's reply was not immediate; to be clear, the eyes had frozen in the sockets.

But the princess continued the conversation in this manner, somewhat adopting a sing-song tune to rainbow the room: "Is it more fun when you're not with me and mama—"

"Mother and _I_."

She almost sucked her lip behind her teeth at the mistake; it was just that the term, _"Mother"_ sounded impersonal to her, but she ultimately cleared her conscience to obey her governess: "...Mother and... _I_."

Despite the impropriety of the question, which bore an intimacy the child would have to be weaned off of, the relationship between princess and governess often followed this format. A question would be launched across the room, and Miss Dietrich would either catch it or bat it, letting Elsa wiggle out the baby teeth in her personality before they were extracted in the near future.

"What makes you ask, Your Highness?"

The child kneaded her knees together. "You don't eat with the other servants, but you don't eat with mama and me, either. Mama says she once loved you like she loves us—"

" _Mother_ and _I_."

"... _Mother_ and _I_."

"I presume the servants complain?"

"No, ma'am. The servants say you should be... _'de_ _—_ _ported'_ back to Carona—"

"Corona."

"—Corona. But I've never heard of that room."

"...Do you think I'm lonely because of what the servants say, Your Highness?"

Elsa shifted uncomfortably. She didn't know why, because Miss Dietrich was too stoical to let her expression slip, but the back of the woman's shoulders always looked very lonely to her, and for that matter, very sad. The castle guards often called her a _'Kraut'_ behind her back, which was a word her father hissed in the dark of night when he looked down at the kingdom, but when she asked her mother what the word meant, all she received was an outrageous gasp, a snatch of the shoulders, and: _"You are never to repeat that word again; do you hear me?"_

"Because Gerda said so," she diverted, suddenly feeling a nameless guilt overtake her.

The woman's head ticked with a sarcastic smile. " _Did_ she now?"

"Yes'm."

"And what did 'Gerda' say?"

Elsa began to bloom with a kind of openness now; she was no longer speaking for herself by using her nursemaid as her mouthpiece: "Gerda said you are _'young for a governess, no more than twenty one,'_ but that your...' _Mona Lisa_ _face has been made old before the years could have a go at it. Not old in the wrinkled way, but old in a way that'_ —...'" Elsa stopped, eyes drifting along the ceiling before she shook her paintbrush to the words like a recital,—"' _starts_ in the soul...and spreads to the _eyes_...changing the...re-late-ion...re-lat-ion- _ship_...between the _body_ and the _heart_.'" She nodded her head to the last two nouns and turned to her governess with an accomplished smile.

"...Astonishing," the woman chilled.

Elsa's smile dropped. She hadn't mentioned _'Kraut,'_ so she didn't see the issue with her diction; it sounded more like polite poetry.

"What _else_ did Miss 'Gerda' say?"

Elsa's thumbs twiddled. "That, _'something happened to make such a face, because it's a very lonely face...'_ "

...The governess stood and wedged her book between the others on the shelf, extraordinarily unemotional in her indifference. "Your Highness, I _am isolated_ , and I suppose some _dark,_ pitiful cloud would come with that, but it should not be gossiped about by nursemaids and _children_. Is that quite reasonable to you?"

"...Yes'm." Though her brain only extracted one thing: ' _Isolated.'_ The word sounded cold, like an iceberg that sat in the middle of a fjord, distant and somehow beautiful, but with icicles that jangled _keep-out._

" _Isolation_ will come with this field of work, and that should be accepted by...the one you call Miss _Gerda_."

Elsa studied the way her governess bit the corners of her mouth, how distant the eyes were as they browsed the spines of books. If she looked in a dictionary, would that be the face of _isolation_? Did it have a face, a character, a room, or was it an iceberg?

"...Miss Dietrich?"

With a rasp in her chest, Miss Dietrich leaned off the bookshelf and faced her student. "Your Highness?" She watched the internal war march in Elsa's eyes.

"...Were you told to flatten your colors?" the child whispered, voice almost shivering like it was the ultimate tragedy of a great drama.

As Elsa looked into her tutor's face now, she saw everything in it go dark. "...What makes you ask such a thing, Your Highness?"

The six year old looked down apologetically, biting her cheek and shrugging a shoulder, hoping to redeem her position with the following words: "Your eyes."

The silence that followed was loud enough to erupt her eardrums.

"It doesn't matter," the hoarse governess finally replied. "You won't grow up with a similar _set_ , if that's what concerns you. His Majesty wouldn't allow it. Princess Elsa of Arendelle will lead a privileged life, with an untroubled smile, surrounded by loving citizens and peers who should like to woo Her Highness." Yet there was no emotional connection between the sentence and the expression that was on Miss Dietrich's face. "Your blood is the gold in the ground because you are royal, and society likes your colors."

Elsa hung on every word, unable to grasp most of them, but her mind tea-cupped the word 'flat,' and associated 'bold' with something that was too big to be swallowed by flat people. Therein her most private self emerged a voice that had been stifled: "The colors I didn't paint...?"

The governess raised one of her own pigtails, positioning it in the light as the sun beamed down on its ink-black strands with the pale, ghostly hand that clutched it. "The ones in your hair and skin, Your Highness. The icy blonde and the pale white. Society feels your colors must be protected; they represent purity, thus praise will follow behind them across oceans."

...What was this trembling in her heart? This distaste for this oversimplification of her own identity?

"But not the ones in my head," Elsa translated, forehead sunken down by the shadow of her thoughts.

...The governess smiled tightly.

It was the first time Elsa had seen her smile with her insides instead of her outsides.

Eyes opened and clarified, the princess turned to her painting to stare at the canvas with fallen shoulders. The synapses quickly snapped. "Not the ones in—..."

"...Your heart."

Elsa frowned.

Miss Dietrich's hand hovered over her shoulder. It shook in mid-land before resting on its intended spot. Elsa glanced at it with swelling eyes, but did not turn. The fingers on the shoulder trembled before gripping. "One day you will understand that a girl only becomes a woman when she's given up one third of herself."

She hardened under the woman's hand, eyebrows meeting in the middle of her forehead, trembling with the words, _"give up"_ and _"self"_ and how they so calmly destroyed each other.

"Some sides of us...must _stay_ hidden if we are to survive, no matter how pretty or fair we are. That is the great rule of the adult world."

 _Hidden._ She couldn't make friends with that word, and nothing about it complemented her playground. "But Mama says the only animals that hide are turtles, crabs, and politicians," she argued, hoping to find a hole in the woman's cloth. She didn't want to be a _crustacean._

"Turtles and crabs are not the only creatures who carry shells in order to survive. Recall what your father has told you: as a young lady, as a _princess_ , you must refrain from speaking your mind in the near future. You must know your place in the world." Her face loomed beside Elsa's like a shoulder angel, squinting into the girl's profile with sad eyes. "Can you... _understand_ this?"

Elsa looked up and over the woman's fingers to see her face, eyes shifting back and forth with _but's_ , _how's_ and _why's_ , before tearing up with a look that said _yes, ok,_ and _if you so say._

The woman's pupils roamed the girl's countenance before she shook her head with a quiver of the lips. "Some nights I wish you had come into the world with kicking feet and screaming _lungs_ , girl..."

Elsa fisted the fabric of her dress. "But—...you said that's not _ladylike_."

Miss Dietrich's mouth throbbed before she pushed off her knees and stood up, turning toward the window of convents with a hand on the ball of her throat.

Elsa clasped her hands together, eyes squeezing the sadness out of them as she watched her governess in silence. "...Miss Dietrich?"

The woman's shoulders raised with her head before falling after the exhale of an inhale. When she turned, her gaze looked warm and wet, as if she could not see past her own eyelashes. "Yes, Your Highness...?"

The damp sheen on Elsa's eyes became a small gleam — weak and unsure of itself, but a supernova in the making. "When I'm queen..." The fretful frown became wryly curled lips. She faced the window, bracing its ledge like a rapport that kept her anchored to her dreams. "I told Mama that I'd make plans for me and Anna."

...The governness narrowed her eyes, smiling with her caressed throat, and half-turned to face the princess. "What plans are these...?"

Elsa tittered sheepishly, the titter in which she always had to lower her head before looking at the listener with a coy smile.

"...Miss Dietrich! Miss _Dietrich_!"

Princess and governess parted and adjusted, caught in a mutual tizzy as a maid came stumbling through the doors of the study. "I'm so s'rry!" the servant panted. "I'm so—...so _very_ sorry!"

"El— _saaa_ ~!" The three year old hopped and skipped out from behind her like a grasshopper, laughing up a storm as the old woman fought her own bones to keep hold of her. Anna only stopped to shade her eyes so that she could scan the room. When she spotted her sister, she released a dramatic gasp from the throat—" _EL_ —sa!"—and ricocheted past the bookstand like a bluejay who'd locked in on a cricket.

"An― _na_ ," Elsa hissed from between her teeth, half-growling and half-laughing as Anna dragged the woman across the room, who had no choice but to follow the reckless bumblebee.

The pigtails in Anna's hair had all but unraveled, leaving one higher than the other in a style suited for circus clowns instead of princesses.

"What—... _timing_." Miss Dietrich tidied herself, once again a master of her expression. "Our second Highness has finished chasing pigs and chickens in court today?"

Elsa watched her governess's body language before flinching up like a wooden plank when her nursemaid stumbled in front of them.

"At long last!" Gerda wheezed and coughed up a laugh. A few curls had escaped her bonnet, framing the sweat on her forehead to make her the picture of exhaustion. "Forgive me, child," she chortled breathlessly, shaking her head as she took pity on Elsa's startled face. "Your nursemaid's getting grey in a matter of _minutes_."

Elsa held her hand to her mouth as her shoulders laughed up and down, before subsequently eyeing Miss Dietrich and putting them in her lap with her eyes.

"Yes, well, that's all fine," Miss Dietrich broke the merry mood, twisting the ruler in her fingers with a critical scowl. "But what of Her Majesty's instructions? Does she not want Princess Anna to return to her quarters for the rest of the evening?"

Gerda used her knees for support as she scooted out a stool for herself, plopping down with an, "Oof!" She wiped herself down with a handkerchief, trying to get inside the neck of her blouse. "The queen thought it wise to scrub all that mud off her, but says...she says she _needs_ to be seeing alphabets instead of sheep tonight, so finishing a wee-lesson before sunset will do just fine."

Miss Dietrich practiced smiling. By the time Anna reached Elsa, Gerda just about gave up on her strength and let the girl have her way.

" _I_ wanna _see_!" Anna tugged and fluttered Elsa's dress like a carpet, bouncing up and down to see over her sister's knees. "Can _I_ see?" When she couldn't maneuver her chin over them, she reduced to pouting impatiently. " _Lemme_ see!"

Giggling behind her hand at Anna's failed attempts, Elsa held her still and turned the canvas in her direction, but not without flinging up a finger in mid-reveal. "But you _can't_ touch it, o _-kay_?"

"Okay, _okay_ aw'ready!"

Biting back a smirk, Elsa turned the canvas all the way around. The picture filled Anna's eyes with rainbows and snowflakes. "Ohhh~!" Her voice then deepened into a playfully confused, "...What _is_ it?"

Elsa pressed a tongue to the corner of her mouth as she glanced at Gerda, before leaning into her sister. "It's gonna be a castle made out of _snow-_ flakes," she hissed suspensefully, using her hand as a wall between themselves and the adults.

Anna gasped, "SNOW-flakes―"

"Shhh," Elsa scolded, trying not to laugh behind her finger. She made a "simmer down" gesture with her hands before pointing to the objects in her painting. "Look, see the sunset? And then the rainbow on the other side? These are supposed to be fairies―"

" _Fairies_?!" Anna dramatized a key lower.

Elsa's voice went a key higher: " _Snow_ fairies. Their wings are snowflakes, and they're putting Arendelle's lanterns in the sky."

"Oooohhhh~..." Anna's mouth shaped into a trumpet as she leaned closer, putting her hand on the pair of eyes that were painted inside the entrance of the castle. "And eyes! Eye—"

—" _Anna_!" Elsa hyperventilated, seizing her sister's wrist to rip her hand off the canvas.

The toddler stumbled back and cradled her fingers to her chest with a look of hurt. Elsa sat in devastation of the smeared watercolors on her maimed portrait. Anna's handprint had distorted the eyes, making them inhuman and unknowable, like a shady creature peering out of a dark, evil hole.

"You—..." Elsa braced the sides of her canvas and shielded it from Anna, squinting at her through her tears. "Y―You _ruined_ it...!"

"... _Sore'ry_ , Elsa," Anna mewled, backing up, her lower lip beginning to quake. She was too confused to shed tears, try as she might to find an explanation in the adult faces flanking her.

"Your _Highness_ ," Miss Dietrich softened, trying to approach her. "It wasn't Princess Anna's—"

"But it _was_!" She snatched her canvas away from the woman's outstretched hand, eyes squeezed up and crinkled.

" _Sore'ry_ , ELSA!" Anna brought her hands together and grew louder with the thought that noise made an apology better.

"Al~righty then, come with _me_ , Your Highness," Gerda tweeted, gently prying Anna away from the situation like a fairy godmother.

"Princess Elsa, _please_ lower your _voice_ ," Miss Dietrich demanded, but Elsa continued to convulse.

Gerda glanced between Miss Dietrich and Elsa with a hand hovering by her mouth, before curling the gloved fingers into a fist and taking a hesitant step forward to lean her face into the elder sister's. " _Elsa,_ dear...I _know_ the situation is most unfortunate, but you have to remember that your sister is only three years old, and a reaction like that..."

Elsa kept shaking her head throughout the woman's entire speech, teeth wearing down her lip and body leaning further away as she clutched the frame of her canvas.

"―And surely..." The nursemaid kept working her hands over each other, looking at the ground as she issued solutions from every direction: "Surely you can make... _another_ handsome piece of art—"

"I can't...!" Elsa wailed at the woman's inability to connect.

"I'll fix it! I'll do it! I'll do it! Please let me do it!" Whether or not Anna understood the situation, she hopped and bounced for her raised hand to be seen.

" _Please_ ," Ms. Dietrich interjected, dividing the group. "I've had enough. Princess Anna, come with me; Princess Elsa?"

"..." Elsa half-hid behind her shoulder, lips clammed up and juddering.

The governess had a strained look in her eyes, as if her chest were short of oxygen. She spoke with a voice that was a little breathless, but completely renewed with superiority, "What are you stopping for? You've come this far, haven't you? Don't you want to show your own colors?"

"But Anna _smeared_ them...!" Her voice was weak and feeble as she drank on her own tears.

"Nonsense. What have I told you time and again? If some parts get ruined, you do what an artist does best, and make some beauty out of the mistake."

"But—"

"Stop. Expression has no room for 'but's.' Add to your new addition; paint inside of it, paint around it; make it an _extension_ of yourself."

A tear squiggled down her cheek and lingered on her chin. "I _can't_..." Her eyelashes flickered, beating violently. "I don't know _how_..."

Her tutor's face went weak, shoulders slumping and the chest that she so often held upright deflating. "Then no one else can help you, Your Highness."

Elsa shook. The words had trampled on her.

The conversation was shelved without further disclosure. The governess departed with Anna in her possession, but Anna stumbled behind the governess, eyes still reaching for her sister. Gerda fretfully held her fingers to her mouth, reaching her arms out to the Elsa's trembling back—

"Please leave her be, ma'am. She must restart the lesson on her own."

Gerda paid Miss Dietrich a troubled gander and returned her concern to Elsa. The child regarded her from her shoulder like a betrayed, shivering deer staring out of a thicket before turning her whole body around as if doing so hid herself from everyone. Gerda shook her head with a palm cupping her cheek in pity before reluctantly situating herself across the room from Anna as her lessons began.

Elsa swiped her mucus with her wrist. The younger sister watched her own fingers draw circles in a handkerchief, but didn't miss a chance to glance at her with the expression of someone trying to use mind control to make the receiver look back at them. Wiping her eye with her forearm, Elsa tried to start back up again while ignoring Anna through resentful tears, hiccuping and sniveling as her unsteady hand struggled to paint. Shadows were bending on the walls as the day began to set on the horizon, but no sooner had her sobs sunk into silence, did she hear someone else's. It began as a cry, something muffled and broken at first, and then swelled into a holler.

Her head snapped in the direction of the window, strands of hair floating back down around her cheeks in tangled wisps. The other side of the kingdom looked back at her like a sad, quiet, and misshapen land, vacant of all sound or voice. She glanced at her company to see if they had heard the deranged howls, but no one moved a finger. Gerda was sowing, Anna was barking alphabets at Miss Dietrich, and Miss Dietrich was flitting from one end of the blackboard to the other.

"Can you tell me what this letter is, Princess?" Miss Dietrich pointed to the "N" before Anna.

"Enn!" Anna chimed from her stool, knocking her knobby ankles together with a grin that stetched from ear to ear.

"Next?"

"Eff!"

"And?"

"Eks!"

"Good—"

"Stars!"

"Pardon?"

"Stars!" Anna pointed at the windowpane. "Stars on the rocks!"

" _Lanterns_ ," Elsa breathed, rubbing her eyes dry with the back of her arm.


End file.
